The present disclosure relates to a hydraulic or other power driven device for use in cleanup of debris after natural disasters, demolition or construction site cleanup as well as other applications. The device described herein is a system that is added to prime movers such as skid-steer loaders and other construction equipment, but is believed to be useful in other applications as well.
Debris fields are created from natural disasters (e.g. tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, and floods, etc.) as well as through man-made projects such as demolition. A major problem involves removing grindable debris before reconstruction can occur. Traditionally, natural or man-made debris is gathered by loaders of various types and placed into trucks to be taken to remote areas where the debris will be processed. In some cases, columns of dump trucks transport debris between the debris fields and a dumpsite. At the dumpsite, the debris is either burned or reduced to debris which is easier to handle. Alternatively, the debris can be placed directly into a landfill. When trucks are used to remove debris from the debris site in its natural state, the trucks are often only minimally loaded from a weight perspective due to the intrinsically low density and high volume of tangled masses of trees, other natural debris, and sometimes man-made debris. This limits the speed of the debris removal as the trucks are not loaded to their weight capacity. Accordingly, the efficiency of the removal process is greatly reduced.
In some cases, stationary chippers or grinders can be located at the debris field and used to reduce the volume of the debris by rending it into smaller chunks or chips so that trucks can haul off a more compact product. However, these are expensive and inefficient to operate. Chippers and grinders are capable of being loaded by only one vehicle at a time. Additionally, chippers and grinders are capable of loading reduced or treated debris into one truck at a time. The debris must be moved twice. The debris must first be transported through the debris field to the chipper or grinder. The debris must then be loaded onto a truck and transported from the debris field to the dumpsite. These procedural steps slow the process of removing debris from the debris field greatly by requiring set up and additional transport time.
Thus, there is a need for a system that is capable of speeding up the debris clearing process as well as providing high density shredded debris in order to increase efficiency and to save fuel, time, and other costs of the cleanup operation.